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James Zborowski, Murray Smith, Film, Art and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film, Screen, Volume 58, Issue 4, Winter 2017, Pages 508–511, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjx044
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In recent decades, the overlapping disciplines of evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have provided insights, tools and methods to researchers and scholars in the arts and humanities. Evolutionary psychology argues, with the support of a wealth of anthropological, experimental and statistical research, that there is such a thing as human nature, bequeathed to our species by its particular quest for reproduction and survival. Two of the main preoccupations of ‘literary Darwinism’ to date have been to debate whether art and fiction are ‘adaptations’ – that is, whether they confer a direct and immediate edge to us in reproduction and survival – or are instead secondary by-products of human evolution;1 and to map evolutionary psychology’s explanations of human behaviour onto literary works, in order to explain the recurrence, persistence, credibility and compellingness of many key tropes of narrative fiction. If the key metaphor of evolutionary psychology is mind-as-survive-and-reproduce-machine, that of cognitive psychology is mind-as-information-processor, and research in the arts and humanities has used this paradigm to open up and refine our understanding of several aspects of our engagement with artworks. One of the best and most prolific cognitivists in any arts discipline is film studies’ David Bordwell, who has, with exemplary rigour and clarity, used cognitivism to shine a light on topics ranging from narration, to visual style, to the act of film interpretation.2 Neuroaesthetics, it is fair to say, remains more of a niche field, possibly due to the expense of its procedures and its unavoidably dense and technical vocabulary. Currently it probably circulates most widely as a method that can offer evidence to substantiate theories formulated in its more well-established evolutionary and cognitive neighbours.
